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RARRRRRRRR!!!! Rarr rarrrr rarrr meow rarr?
RARRRRR!!! Rarr. Rarrr
rarr J-List rarrrr.

2009jun21. Actual instance of “cool vampire” from back during Flapper era: Ivory Soap gloms onto fashion revolution. HEYS YOUSE TEENS, WE GOT YOUR “LINGO” AND WE’RE “HEP” TO YOUR “THREADS” DADDY-O NOW BUY OUR SHIT

2009jun12. Friday.

2009jun02. Blue Goose Mountain Fruit, Penryn Fruit Company, Penryn, California.

2009jun01.

2009may29. Ingredients: reduced fat milk, Reese’s® peanut butter cup ice cream (Reese’s peanut butter cup ice cream (cream, nonfat milk, Reese’s® peanut butter cup pieces (milk chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, chocolate, nonfat milk, milkfat, lactose, soya lecithin (an emulsifier)), peanuts, sugar, dextrose, salt, tbhq and citric acid (as preservatives)), sugar, corn syrup, whey, n&a vanilla flavor, cellulose gum, mono and diglycerides, guar gum, carrageenan, polysorbate 80, annatto color), peanut butter ‘n chocolate ice cream (cream, nonfat milk, peanut butter chunky ribbon (peanuts, cottonseed and/or peanut oil, high fructose corn syrup, salt), sugar, corn syrup, whey, cocoa powder (processed with alkali), chocolate liquor (processed with alkali), cellulose gum, mono and diglycerides, guar gum, carrageenan, polysorbate 80), Reese’s® peanut butter sauce (peanuts; peanut oil; sugar; contains 2% or less of: cornstarch; salt; and hydrogenated vegetable oil (rapeseed, cottonseed, and soybean oils)), Reese’s® peanut butter cups (milk chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, chocolate, non fat milk, milk fat, lactose, and soy lecithin and pgpr (emulsifiers)), peanuts, sugar, dextrose, salt, and tbhq (preservative)), hot fudge sauce (sugar, corn syrup, water, partially hydrogenated coconut oil, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, cocoa (treated with alkali), nonfat milk solids, modified food starch, salt, sodium bicarbonate, potassium sorbate-as preservative, natural and artificial flavors, lecithin, propyl paraben – as a preservative), whipped cream (whipped cream (cream, milk, sugar, dextrose, nonfat dry milk, artificial flavor, mono & diglycerides, carrageenan, mixed tocopherols (vitamin e), to protect flavor, propellant: nitrous oxide), Reese’s® peanut butter cups (milk chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, chocolate, non fat milk, milk fat, lactose, and soy lecithin and pgpr (emulsifiers)), peanuts, sugar, dextrose, salt, and tbhq (preservative)).

2009may28. Winsom Whole Wax Beans. Edgett-Burnham Company, Newark, New York.

2009may15. Friday.

2009may08. Mail.

Why does the box of Target candy I bought say Soduim instead of Sodium?

It is a mistake. The mistake is this: you bought candy from Target. Unless you meant this Target. That was also a mistake. Writing me: yet another mistake. YOU HAVE MADE THREE MISTAKES ALREADY! YER OUT!

You have been dispatched. You may go now. Thank you, your services are no longer required. Use this cardboard box [Here the escort agent will proffer / coyly waggle a large, sturdy cardboard box to the party in question] to clean out your [desk / cubicle / rolling station / cash box / lair / locker / can / orb]. A [security guard / gang of 19th century pre-teen detective-assisting street toughs / Belinda Carlisle impersonator / person of unspecified gender wearing a bulky high quality penguin costume / space security guard] will assist you to [the door / your car / Moline / Airlock “B7"].

2009may06.

2009may04.

2009may02.

2009apr18. Excerpts from one chapter of Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck (2002), by Paul Collins.

And everyone knew that William Ireland wasn’t clever enough to write well in his own modern tongue, never mind forge a document in Elizabethan English. They would have been right on the last count, if only they could see it. William couldn’t forge a document in Elizabethan English, as his love letter to Anne Hathaway demonstrates:

O Anna doe Ilove doe I cheryshe thee inne mye hearte forre thou arete as a talle Cedarre stretchynge forthe its branches ande succourynge smaller Plants fromme nyppynge Winneterre orr the boysterouse Wyndes Farewelle toe Morrowe bye tymes I wille see thee tille thenne Adewe sweete Love

This was the work of an ambitious but inexperienced youth who mimicked old writing by arbitrary additions of double consonants, replacing i with y, and tacking e at the end of words. It wasn’t Elizabethan dialect. ¶ It wasn’t any dialect. [pg 36]

On Christmas Eve 1795, the London Times ran a notice that Miscellaneous Papers Under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare was now ready to be picked up at Samuel’s house. [ ... ] The obvious target for ridicule was Ireland’s bizarre spelling, and on January 14 a journalist at The Telegraph happily “discovered” another letter of Shakespeare’s:

Tooo Missteerree Beenjaammiinnee Joohnnssonn:
Deeree Sirree,
Wille youe doee meee theee favvourree too dinnee wythee meeee onnn Friddaye nextte attt twoo off theee clockee too eatee sommee muttonne choppes andd somme poottaattooeesse
I amm deerree sirree

Yourre goodde friendde
Williame Shaekspare [pg 40]

By now the public had accepted the notion that William had been behind the forgeries, and for some time William had been receiving inquiries from interested collectors: did he still have any of the old Shakespeare forgeries lying around? Perhaps he would like to sell them? The manuscript of Vortigern, say? Might he still have that in his possession? ¶ Oh yes, William would reply. It just so happens that I do. ¶ It just so happened that William always had one in his possession. For ever since the forgeries had been exposed, and become a subject of morbid literary interest, he had been quietly doing something almost dazzlingly postmodern in its sheer ingenuity and conception. ¶ He was making forgeries of the forgeries. ¶ No fewer than seven “original” copies of the manuscript of Vortigern surfaced after William’s death, along with a whole array of other copies that he made of the Shakespeare papers. Each is utterly authentic in appearance; it is impossible to tell which is the original and which is the copy. After all, the collectors were getting them straight from the source, and besides, who’d ever heard of a forgery of a forgery? [pg 51]

2009apr07. Cocaine-carrying jungle camp semi-subs.

2009apr07. Mail.

what is your store phonenumber?We are doing a projectin school please contact us.

1 888 717 7517. Thank you!

2009apr07.

2009apr07. So the “MUNI” light rail vehicle stopped right in front of us and we were the last to board and it was packed so we were standing on the steps, nearly pressed against the doors. I was toting along a book bag, a new kicky addition to my wardrobe that all the ladies were grooving on – and we had had a pretty full day in the city. I was sort of out of it, and just wanted to get home, but we weren’t moving. There were no buzzing noises etc like BART when someone is blocking a door, so all of us in the vehicle slightly craned our necks and looked around hoping to discover the cause of our delay. Finally the driver jumped outside and we’re all thinking “oh, here we go, someone’s going to get it” and he comes right over to where I am and points out my book bag is resting on the door push bar. A) Ever since the first time I got on a MUNI, I’ve hated the design of these things and thought it would be pretty easy to accidentally activate it during typical packed rush hour nonsense B) I’m not easily embarrassed, but there is nothing I hate more than people who get in my way when I’m going from A (not the “A” I’ve just mentioned) to B (not the “B” you’re currently inside of, all snuggly). So to have held up an entire light rail vehicle – even if it was only for a half-minute – filled me with a deep something-something that really got my goat, because again, it was because of this cockamamie bar thing. And all of those people, coming home a half-minute later now – what about their lives? Have I changed them for better, or for worse? Do they come home later to barely miss the gun-toting robber? Or do they give their loved one just enough time to finish putting the frosting on a post-work cupcake? The worst thing, the most horrible thing, is that I’ll never know what happened. All my stories, lost. C) There was a gal sitting facing me – we locked eyes after the doors closed and we were just staring at each other full-bore. Hers were gray, she looked Russian. It went way way past the “perhaps someone should look away” stage. We ended up going out, dating for awhile, living together, growing old, having affairs, travelling a lot – we both died around the same time and then the train started moving.

2009mar28.

2009mar28. I wrote a song for you. It goes exactly like this:

Let’s all go to Gimlet Town.
We can let our hair down in Gimlet Town.
Nobody’s a square in Gimlet Town.
Gimlet Town.
Gimlet Town ...
[spoken word breakdown]
It is a drink that is shared, between two people. It is a drink that fosters a sense of belonging. It is a drink of community.
It is a gimlet.
[thunderous orchestra crash]
Well they told me you moved out
And you sure as hell didn’t tell me
So I went home and made some gimlets
And turned on the goddamned TV
I’m in Gimlet Town.

2009mar23.

2009mar22. Excerpts from Self-Made Man, One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood And Back Again (2006), by Norah Vincent.

My tutor went over a few gender cues in our lessons, but it took being Ned for quite some time before I realized just how differently men and women talk and how much damping down I would have to do as Ned so as not to arouse suspicion. My tutor said, “Women tend to bankrupt their own breath.” She described and demonstrated the process by thrusting her chest and head forward when she spoke, and cutting off the rhythm of her breathing as she forced a stream of words from her mouth. [ ... ] Since my training, I have also observed this phenomenon in action at various dinner parties or in restaurants. Women often lean into a conversation and speak in wordy bursts, asking to be heard. Men often lean back and pronounce with terse authority. [pg 14]

Am I transsexual or a transvestite, and did I write this book as a means of coming out as such? ¶ The answer to both parts of that question is no. ¶ I say this with the benefit of experimental hindsight, because after having lived as a man on and off for a year and a half, if I were either a transsexual or a true lifestyle transvestite, I can assure you that I would know it by now. [pg 15]

It was more affectionate than any handshake I’d ever received from a strange woman. To me, woman-on-woman introductions often seem fake and cold, full of limp gentility. I’ve seen a lot of women hug one another this way, too, sometimes even women who’ve known each other for a long time and think of themselves as being good friends. They’re like two backward magnets pushed together by convention. [pg 25]

Beer and cigarettes were their medicine, their primrose path to an early grave, which was about the best, aside from sex and a few good times with the guys, that they could hope for in life. The idea of telling one of these guys that smoking or drinking to excess was bad for his health was too ridiculously middle class to entertain. It bespoke a supreme ignorance of what their lives were really like – Hobbesian – not to put too fine a point on it. Nasty, brutish and short. The idea that you would try to prolong your grueling, dead-end life, and do it by taking away the few pleasures you had along the way, was just insulting. [pg 38]

As men they felt compelled to fix my ineptitude rather than be secretly happy about it and try to abet it under the table, which is what a lot of female athletes of my acquaintance would have done. I remember this from playing sports with and against women all my life. No fellow female athlete ever tried to help me with my game or give me tips. It was every woman for herself. It wasn’t enough that you were successful. You wanted to see your sister fail. [pg 44]

As Curtis and I said goodnight and walked away, I found myself thinking about rejection and how small it made me feel, and how small most men must feel under the weight of what women expect from them. [ ... ] So how must men feel when it’s a true encounter and everything in the game seems stacked against them? They make the move, or the women bluff them – without tipping their hands – into making the move. The guys step out (stupidly, it now seems to me) into the space between, saying something irreversible and frank – a compliment or an outright indication of interest – and most of the time the women step away, or laugh disdainfully, and the guys are left with their asses in the wind. That’s the sport, and men are the suckers. [pg 99]

Yet as Paul, who has spent years in the men’s movement trying to defend it to angry feminists, once put it to me, “It is women who are paying the highest price for men’s dysfunction. We are not in opposition to them at all.” And he’s right. Men’s healing is in women’s interest, though for women that healing will mean accepting on some level not only that men are – here is the dreaded word – victims of the patriarchy, too, but (and this will be the hardest part to swallow) that women have been codeterminers in the system, at times as invested and active as men themselves in making and keeping men in their role. From the feminist point of view this sounds at best like an abdication of responsibility, an easy way out for the inventor, and at worst an infuriating instance of blaming the true victim. But from Paul’s point of view it means that men and women are finally agreeing on something: the system sucks. [pg 271]

Somebody is always evaluating your manhood. Whether it’s other men, other women, even children. And everybody is always on the lookout for your weakness or your inadequacy, as if it’s some kind of plague they’re terrified of catching, or, more importantly, of other men catching. If you don’t make the right move, put your eyes in the right place at any given moment, in the eyes of the culture at large that threatens the whole structure. [ ... ] And that, I learned very quickly, is the straitjacket of the male role, and one that is no less constrictive than its feminine counterpart. You’re not allowed to be a complete human being. Instead you get to be a coached jumble of stoic poses. You get to be what’s expected of you. [pg 276]

I had at times the billy club confidence of pure stupid unwarranted self-belief that I have seen in more guys than I can count. I always used to wonder how they did it. Now know. They did it because a tough front is all you have when there’s nothing behind it but the weakness that you’re not allowed to show. [pg 279]

Even in the thick of the project when I went out into the world as myself, during the off periods when I was writing or taking a break from full-time Ned, people almost invariably mistook me for a man even when I was wearing a tight white T-shirt without a bra. Yet after I had finished the project, detoxed from Ned for several months and reclaimed my mental femininity, people everywhere addressed me as “ma’am” even in the dead of winter when I was wearing a black watch cap and a man’s navy peacoat. [pg 282]

2009mar20.

2009mar13.

2009mar13. Friday thing.

2009mar03. Since Amazon’s tip jar no longer works, I have added two monetary options to this page and they should show up to the left unless their car broke down: a free-form “donate” button, and a $1/month “subscribe” button which is automatic and saves you the drudgery of trying to find me each month to give me a dollar. Can anyone live on $1 a month? No. Why do you ask such silly questions? It is impossible. It is a trifle, a tiny thing. Let us say you spend $280 a month on sex workers. Why, $279 would probably be nearly functionally equivalent. Would you miss $1 of sex work that much? I don’t think I would. The same argument could be made for alcohol, drugs, and health insurance. Don’t insure one of your fingernails, each month. Rotate. There are riders for this. ¶ One day I will draw some of my own buttons, but for now, we’ll go with the canonical shiny horse pill design so loved by everyone.

2009feb27. Friday Freeday.

2009feb27. Excerpts from Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (2006), by Joshua Zeitz. NYT: review plus first chapter.

It’s easy, in retrospect, to lose sight of just how radical the flapper appeared to her elders. Until World War I, few women other than prostitutes ventured into saloons and barrooms. As late as 1904, a woman had been arrested on Fifth Avenue in New York City for lighting up a cigarette. It wasn’t until 1929 that some railroad companies formally abolished their prohibition against women smokers in dining cars. [pg 6]

But if the flapper faithfully represented millions of young women in the Jazz Age, she was also a character type, fully contrived by the nation’s first “merchants of cool.” These artists, advertisers, writers, designers, film starlets, and media gurus fashioned her sense of style, her taste in clothing and music, the brand of cigarette she smoked, and the kind of liquor she drank – even the shape of her body and the placement of her curves. Their power over the nation’s increasingly centralized print and motion picture media, and their mastery of new developments in group psychology and the behavioral sciences, lent them unusual sway over millions of young women who were eager to assert their autonomy but still looked to cultural authorities for cues about consumption and body image. Like so many successor movements in the twentieth century, the flapper phenomenon emphasized individuality, even as it expressed itself in conformity. [pg 8]

Now, with America fully mobilized for war and thousands of doughboys in starched uniforms flooding Camp Sheridan, Zelda found herself one of the mostly hotly pursued belles in the state. Army aviators stationed at Camp Taylor honored her with elaborate aerial stunts and flyovers above the Sayre household, until an unfortunate pilot crashed his plane and died in a futile attempt to win Zelda’s affections. [pg 19; similarly, Lee Miller]

Before he met Zelda, he had been involved with another young Montgomery belle, a fellow Catholic with whom he once visited St. Peter’s Church to pay penance. After Scott had cleansed away his sins, his girlfriend stepped into the confession box and ticked off a number of minor transgressions against God and man. When she finished, the priest asked, “Is that all, my daughter?”
“I ... I ... think so,” she replied tentatively.
“Are you sure, my daughter?”
“That’s all I can remember.”
“No, that’s not all, my daughter,” he answered severely. “I fear I shall have to prompt you ... Because I heard your young man’s confession first.” [pg 26]

Though the Klan particularly deplored “the revolting spectacle of a white woman clinging in the arms of a colored man,” more hum-drum violations of Victorian propriety also vexed members of the Hooded Empire. In Evansville, Indiana, William Wilson, the teenage son of the local Democratic congressman, remembered that Klan riders ruthlessly patrolled back roads in search of teenagers embroiled in wild petting parties or improper embraces. “They entered homes without search warrants” and “flogged errant husbands and wives. They tarred and feathered drunks. They caught couples in parked cars ... ” [pg 74]

In 1922, Julia H. Kennedy, an official at the Illinois Department of Health, claimed that girls from small towns outside of Chicago and St. Louis were conducting themselves with even more reckless abandon than their big-city sisters. Among their other offenses, these small-town girls drank homemade concoctions like white mule and lemon extract from flasks that they tied around their necks. [pg 79]

In later years, the Round Table was commonly remembered as a venue for highbrow discussions of highbrow ideas – the intellectual nerve center of 1920s America. It wasn’t so. As Ross admitted to the notorious Baltimore wit H. L. Mencken, “I never heard any literary discussion or any discussion of any other art – just the usual personalities of some people getting together, and a lot of wisecracks, and quoting of further wisecracks.” ¶ Clever friends telling clever – and self-referential – jokes over lunch would never have caught fire had not the key players all been connected in some way or another to the press. [ ... ] This almost shameless promotional collaboration quickly transformed the Round Table participants into parlor-set headliners. By the mid-1920s, tourists were dropping by the Algonquin around lunchtime just to steal a glimpse of New York’s allegedly sharpest minds. [pg 84]

From the 1870s to the 1920s, roughly half of all female college graduates opted out of marriage entirely, compared with only a tenth of American women on the whole. [ ... ] In these years, it was common for educated middle-class women, particularly professionals and social activists, to forge so-called Boston marriages – long-term domestic partnerships that were acknowledged openly but lacked any real legal standing. [ ... ] The Victorians didn’t feel particularly threatened by these domestic partnerships or by more casual romantic ties between unmarried women. For one, few medical or scientific experts envisioned rigid distinctions like homosexuality and heterosexuality until the late nineteenth century – the age of eugenics, social Darwinism, scientific management, and taxonomy – when all the natural world suddenly seemed fodder for rigorous study and classification. More important, unmarried women forming close bonds with other unmarried women didn’t pose a fundamental threat to the Victorian gender code; married women in the workplace did. ¶ The same forces that revolutionized sex, romance, and courtship in the early twentieth century shattered this Victorian world in which women could openly nurture emotional and physical ties with one another. By the 1920s, it was completely normal for girls and boys to disappear with each other in the dark recesses of parked cars and movie theater balconies. It had become abnormal for two women to do these things together. [pg 119]

Years later, when asked how she emerged from obscurity to become the world’s most important designer of women’s clothes, Chanel said it was simple. “Two gentlemen were outbidding each other over my hot little body.” [pg 134]

But as working men and women lost control over their political and economic lives, they flexed their muscles in the purchase of shiny new things, an activity that seemed to hold out the promise of a new brand of “democratic” citizenship. Upward mobility was redefined as the right to dress like the Rockefellers rather than earn like the Rockefellers; the ownership of commodities replaced the ownership of labor as a mark of social achievement. More and more, the personal became political. ¶ In effect, Americans embraced a new definitions of freedom that hinged on participation in a burgeoning consumer economy. How “democratic” this new order – and how “free” the average consumer – really was was open to debate. A social critic for The Atlantic Monthly worried that “individuality, in the sense of a man’s distinct personality, in the material domain, is becoming an increasingly rarer phenomenon. We are forced to a common standard. Even those of us who have not material objectives cannot be non-conformers. For the few are powerless to escape the brand of eighty millions. We are socialized into an average.” [pg 171]

Where Colleen Moore bought a mansion, Clara [Bow] purchased a modest seven-room Spanish bungalow made of stucco for $15,000. She filled one room with dirt, so her dog would have somewhere to play at night. [pg 239]

Shortly after World War I, Boy Capel – the great love of Coco’s life – wed another woman. Months later, he died in a car crash in southern France. Coco drove to the site of the accident and wept. ¶ In 1926, she introduced the “little black dress.” She told close friends that she had put the whole world in mourning for Boy. [pg 285]

2009feb12. Dear Yelp: You used to be cool, but now, you can die. Your shakedown tactics are sad, and the internet does not like sadness.

2009feb10. For some reason I have joined the Facebook facespooks. I’m not sure why this is, since the whole thing creeps me out with creepiness. Well, in any event, now you can be my friend and we can run up the grassy hill holding hands and singing a friend song la la la, la la LA la laaaaaa laala before the tracking dogs are released. In other news, I drove an SUV with a fully-loaded trailer to LA, so I get the non-rollover merit badge now.

2009jan28. Adam McEwen’s Untitled (Dead).

2009jan17. Matt Taibbi on Thomas Friedman: A B-3X = Swedish girls like chocolate.

2008: jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec 2009: jan feb mar apr

Book: Animals in Translation Book: Pranks! Book: Adrift - 76 Days Lost At Sea Book: Secret Language of Sleep Book: Consider the Lobster